I always wondered what the Eighth Doctor thought when he left in the TARDIS following the Monk's revelations that, due to his own desire for revenge and riches and a chance to cause a massive change to history, he was responsible for the Daleks smashing their way and nearly succeeding in conquering the universe, resulting in the loss of Alex, Lucie, and Tamsin.

I don't own Doctor Who, although I wish I did; that way the current mess the show has become will not have happened.

My Fault.

It's all my fault; Lucie, Alex, Tamsin… so many thousands of millions of people dead, all because the Monk wanted to get his revenge on me after what my original self had done to him and to his TARDIS when I stranded him in 1066, stealing the dimensional control from the console, and then stole his directional unit while messing around with his chameleon circuit while we were being chased by the Daleks.

The Doctor rubbed his face as he stood partially leaning against the console of the TARDIS after he'd set the ship to leave the 22nd century following a second Dalek invasion of Earth, the adrenaline and the anger slowly fading away from his body despite his efforts to keep himself angry.

But right now all he felt was numb. He didn't know where the TARDIS was going, and frankly, he did not care. He didn't care if the old girl took him backwards or forwards in time, to the other side of the Milky Way, or to the other side of the universe. He just wanted to be left alone.

He needed to get away from this point in history, he needed to think and while he missed her company already, a part of the Doctor was relieved Susan wasn't there although he regretted it because she would have been able to stop him. Right now, he felt he needed somebody to keep him from making some terrible mistake.

A large part of him wanted nothing more than to slip back in time a brief journey, snatch Lucie away from the explosion where the Daleks' time warp engine would be destroyed by the saucer his friend had commandeered for the job. But he held himself back. If he was going to do that, he wanted to have the best plan imaginable while he shook his anger off at what the Monk had done.

But at the same time, he knew he wouldn't; the Doctor had long since disdained the Monks' actions of meddling in history as dangerous and reckless. Changing history had terrifying effects on the rest of the timeline, and besides despite everything he could tell himself he was still a Time Lord, which meant he would not meddle in history and would always uphold the almighty Laws of Time.

Deep down, at the moment, the Doctor did not want to be anything like the Monk. Not after the insane things the Monk had just done. The other Time Lord had gone too far this time around, and the last thing he wanted was to cross similar lines.

Ever since that mess in London after he had harnessed the power of a chronovore, of all things, and that confrontation where the Doctor's own immediate predecessor had fought the Monk who had been behind the strange changes to history and the creation of a series of alternate timelines including a horrible one where his third incarnation had failed to cure the Silurian virus, and the human race had been decimated while UNIT and the surviving other military forces on Earth fought against the Silurians and the Sea Devils as a result, the Doctor had been more than aware of how much the Monk desired revenge.

The encounter with the Monk back in his third incarnation during the start of his exile, and how the Monk had persuaded him to go with him to acquire a vortex manipulator to regain his freedom to travel again in time and space only to strand him in turn, out of revenge after how the Doctor himself had done the same thing to the Monk in 1066, was proof enough as it was of how the Monk wanted him to pay.

The Doctor back then had been so desperate to escape Earth he had willingly ignored the warning signs.

The Monk had no reason to take him anywhere, and it was almost certainly a trap, but the other Time Lord had dangled the freedom to return to travelling freely in time and space once again like Buridan's ass where that cruel experiment involving a hungry donkey had taken place, only in this case the Monk had dangled his desire to escape the 20th century of Earth. But when they had met again while they'd still been in those incarnations, they hadn't spoken of the event; either the Monk hadn't experienced them yet, or he had done something reckless with his timeline to erase the moment from history.

The Doctor would not put it past the Monk to have done it either.

The mess with Artemis the chronovore had been bad enough but the Doctor had privately accepted that his original self had caused a lot of trouble for the Monk, and it was no wonder the other Time Lord had come after him.

But the current version of the Monk who had travelled with Lucie, coerced and manipulated Tamsin…, helped the Dalek Time Controller after he had fallen backwards through time following the encounter with it two lives ago, and released one of the amethyst viruses the Doctor had been certain had been destroyed or lost in history into Earth's atmosphere before the Daleks returned and massacred the human population and undid all of the hard work Susan and the others had done to repair the damage caused by the previous invasion.

He had thought the original invasion had been bad, when the Daleks had planned to just replace Earth's core with a space engine was bad while they transformed the planet into a giant warship.

But the Dalek Time Controller came from Dalek stock which was thousands of years more advanced than anything currently employed by the Empire. The Time Controller had knowledge of temporal theory and engineering, and it had likely passed on that knowledge to the Daleks living currently in the 22nd century. It wasn't surprising the Time Controller had planned to install something bigger and much much worse than a simple space engine.

Did the Monk help them with the design and the technology while he left Tamsin to collect and catalogue all of Earth's cultural treasures? The Doctor wasn't sure, but considering the Monk's Time Lord knowledge and expertise, it would make sense if the Time Controller twisted the Monk's arm to make the other Time Lord work for them. Not that the Monk would resist, considering how cowardly the other Time Lord was.

But no matter how hard he looked at it, the Doctor knew a large amount of the blame for everything that had happened, that everything the Monk was responsible for was down to the Doctor.

It was because of his first incarnation's interventions - the theft of the dimensional control and directional unit from the Monk's TARDIS - that forced the Monk to come after him in the first place. For hundreds of years that version of the time meddler spent spying on the Doctor's lives until capturing Artemis, and using the chronovore's time-warping powers to change history and create little pocket realities before attacking the Doctor's seventh life openly.

It had been the defeats that had made the Monk's incarnation with the moustache personally arrive in the Doctor's third incarnation and tempt him with a vortex manipulator when in truth he wanted to strand the Doctor somewhere to teach him a lesson. Perhaps he'd have been better off if that had happened, looking back in hindsight. It would have taught him a lesson.

Or what about that mess when the Monk tinkered with human genetics? However, the Doctor had little doubt in his mind it would have happened regardless. The scheme was already unstable by the time his third self and Jo arrived at the clinic.

It was thanks to his seventh self's defeat of the Monk during Winston Churchill's re-election after the Second World War (while the Doctor would have liked his old friend to garner more success, it was due to the fixed nature of the event which had made him do that to Winston and he still felt bad about it) the Monk had gained more loathing for him.

The Doctor wondered which version of the Monk he had just dealt with, but it made little difference right now for him. This version of the Monk had taken Lucie with him before planning on abandoning her on Deimos while coercing Tamsin (he could not understand Tamsin's stupidity; she had dealt with the Monk in Kell's, saw his nonchalance and was angry about it so why would she change so drastically, although truthfully there were moments where she wasn't particularly bright) to travel with him and make him out to be the bad guy.

Tamsin had no idea what the Monk was doing and she hadn't even known Earth had been invaded by the Daleks. She had merely seen the Daleks as alien missionaries before confronted with the truth.

But all of those innocent deaths… they wouldn't have happened if the Doctor hadn't foiled the Monk's plans and while a part of him felt he was overthinking it, he couldn't help it especially since Lucie, Tamsin, and Alex had simultaneously died. Their deaths hurt him the most, especially Alex who was his great-grandson. He had deserved better.

The Doctor leaned against one of the console struts and sobbed. The next time he dealt with the Monk, he would make sure the other Time Lord paid the price for this.